=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-3293/paper70 |storemode=property |title=Fumigation Monitoring and Modeling of Hopper-bottom Railcars Loaded with Corn Grits - Abstract |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper70.pdf |volume=Vol-3293 |authors=Daniel Brabec,Efstathios Kaloudis,Christos G. Athanassiou,James Campbell,Paraskevi Agrafioti,Deanna S. Scheff,Sotiris Bantas,Vasilis Sotiroudas |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/BrabecKACASBS22 }} ==Fumigation Monitoring and Modeling of Hopper-bottom Railcars Loaded with Corn Grits - Abstract== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3293/paper70.pdf
Fumigation Monitoring and Modeling of Hopper-bottom
Railcars Loaded with Corn Grits - Abstract
Daniel Brabec 1, Efstathios Kaloudis 2,3, Christos G. Athanassiou 4, James Campbell 1,
Paraskevi Agrafioti 4, Deanna S. Scheff 1, Sotiris Bantas 2 and Vasilis Sotiroudas 2,5
1
  USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Center for Grain and Animal Health Research, 1515 College Avenue,
Manhattan, KS 66505, USA.
2
  Centaur Analytics, Inc., 1923 Eastman ave., Ste 200, Ventura, 93003 CA, USA
3
  Department of Food Science and Nutrition, University of the Aegean, Greece
4
  Laboratory of Entomology and Agricultural Zoology, Department of Agriculture, Crop Production and Rural
Environment, University of Thessaly, Phytokou str., 38446, Volos, Magnesia, Greece
5
  Agrospecom, N. Kountourioti 3, Thessaloniki, 54625, Greece


                Summary
                Bulk railcars are a common method of moving commodities in the United States. Allowances
                are given for the practice of treating railcars with fumigates during transit because the routes
                are limited access and not on public roads. Recent technology has become available for
                monitoring phosphine gas (PH3) fumigation on railcars which log the phosphine concentration
                and temperature of the test point in the railcars. Industrial cooperators allowed for the
                monitoring of fumigations for two shipments of corn grit, which were being transported in
                hopper bottom railcars. Several sensing units were used in each railcar and spaced across the
                top layer. Data were collected during the eight-day trip from grain mill to processor. The
                phosphine concentrations at the top varied with time with phosphine spiking over 1600 ppm
                and gradually settling to over 300 ppm at the end of the eight days. Total gas dosage was
                estimated as concentration*time (CT) over the eight days as 115,000 and 125,000 ppm*hr at
                the top of each railcar. Because access to lower depths in the railcar were not available,
                supplement experiments were performed with small columns of corn grits (2.5 m height x 0.55
                m dia) to test for phosphine below the top surface. A higher and lower phosphine treatments
                were applied to the columns. These tests found significant phosphine penetration into the bulk
                at 2 m depth with ~380 ppm after two days and going down to ~260 ppm after eight days with
                the high phosphine treatment. Bioassays of both phosphine susceptible and resistant, adult
                Rhyzopertha dominica (F.), lesser grain borer, and Tribolium castaneum (Herbst), red flour
                beetle, were included at both the surface (0 cm), 25 cm and 60 cm below the surface. All
                insects, at all locations, were dead after eight days. The railcar and the fumigation treatments
                were additionally modeled with a CFD simulation approach. The simulation models were
                shown to provide estimates of the phosphine concentration and distribution which matched
                well the observed data, validating the CFD approach as an efficient tool for future planning
                and analysis of similar fumigations.

                Keywords 1
                phosphine, lesser grain borer, red flour beetle, computational fluid dynamics, wireless sensors,
                mathematical modeling

                Acknowledgements
                This research is part of the project «Management of entomological infestations in the stored
                products by using innovative technologies» (Project code: ΚΜΡ6-0081034) that is co-funded


Proceedings of HAICTA 2022, September 22–25, 2022, Athens, Greece
EMAIL: stathiskaloudis@aegean.gr (A. 2); athanassiou@uth.gr (A. 3); agrafiot@uth.gr (A. 5)
ORCID: 0000-0001-8192-865X (A. 1); 0000-0001-7602-3282 (A. 2); 0000-0001-6578-4019 (A. 3); 0000-0003-2741-3748 (A. 6); 0000-
0003-1809-1177 (A. 8)
             ©️ 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
             Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
             CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)




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by Greece and European Union by the Action «Investment Plans of Innovation» in Central
Macedonia under the framework of the Operational Program «Central Macedonia 2014 2020».




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